Current Courses
Next-gen sequencing: data acquisition, comparative genomics, design and analysis for population genetics, systematics and development
Dates: 11-Jun-2012 ~ 19-Jun-2012
This course will provide computational training required for those working with Next-generation sequencing data and is aimed in particular at senior graduate students, research fellows and faculty that are producing genomic data. The course aims to lower the learning curve and increase familiarity of wet-lab scientists with informatic techniques. We will cover manipulation of next-gen sequencing data, analysis of metagenomic data, phylogeny reconstruction from NGS and RNA quantification with and without a reference genome. We will use tools such as Amazon EC2, Galaxy, Geneious, SAMtools, QIIME, Trinity RNA-Seq, edgeR, TopHat, LOX and PhyDesign.
Anatomy ontologies in evolutionary biology and genetics
Dates: 30-Jul-2012 ~ 3-Aug-2012
Evolutionary research has been revolutionized by the explosion of genetic information available, and anatomy ontologies must play a central crucial in relating this knowledge to observable diversity. Anatomy ontologies and vocabularies are widely used to index data and are critical for relating gene expression and phenotype data across taxa. Within a single species, anatomy ontologies provide scaffolding that interconnects many kinds of observations; across species, they provide evolutionary, developmental, and mechanistic insights. In order for anatomy ontologies to successfully serve all of these purposes, they must be constructed consistently so that they can be utilized and understood by both researcher and software alike. This course aims to teach proper ontology design principles and practices such that anatomical interoperability across evolutionarily disparate taxa is achieved. It further seeks to promote community growth and adoption of ontology-based methods and tools. The subsequent benefit is in the form of shared access to the unique data store of each community (e.g. genetic, genomic, developmental, and evolutionary data). The course covers a basic introduction to ontology design principles and usage, specific ontology considerations for anatomy, application of anatomy ontologies in the context of evolutionary phenotype comparison, and use of anatomy ontologies for image annotation in different taxa. There will be strong emphasis on hands-on exercises that will develop ontology skills and provide exposure to different software applications that are useful in variety of areas of evolutionary biology.
Evolutionary Quantitative genetics
Dates: 6-Aug-2012 ~ 11-Aug-2012
In this workshop we will review the basics of theory in the field of evolutionary quantitative genetics and its connections to evolution that is observed at various time scales. Quantitative genetics deals with the inheritance of measurements of traits that are affected by many genes. Quantitative genetic theory for natural populations was developed considerably in the period 1970-90 and up to the present time. It has been applied to a wide range of phenomena including the evolution of differences between the sexes, sexual preferences, life history traits, plasticity of traits, as well as the evolution of body size and other morphological measurements. Textbooks have not kept pace with these developments, and currently few universities offer courses in this subject aimed at evolutionary biologists. There is a need for evolutionary biologists to understand this field because of the ability to collect large amounts of data by computer, the development of statistical methods for changes of traits on evolutionary trees and for changes in a single species through time, and the realization that quantitative characters will not soon be fully explained by genomics. This workshop aims to fill this need by reviewing basic aspects of theory and illustrating how that theory can be tested with data. Participants will learn to use R, an open-source statistical programming language, to build and test evolutionary models. The intended participants for this workshop are graduate students, postdocs, and junior faculty members in evolutionary biology.
The NESCent Academy
Starting in 2011, all courses are being offered through the NESCent Academy. The Academy is a new, community-driven process for developing and offering short post-graduate courses in synthetic evolutionary science, as well as evolutionary biology workshops for educators. We asked you, the evolutionary biology community, to suggest course ideas, vote on your ideas and submit full proposals. Here is our list of 2011 courses. The NESCent Academy website has detailed information about instructors, dates and how to apply.
- Evolutionary quantitative genetics: Steve Arnold and Joe Felsenstein
- Next-gen sequencing: data acquisition, comparative genomics, design and analysis for population genetics, systematics and development: Brian O'Connor and Alexie Papanicolaou
- Practical computing for biologists: Steve Haddock and Casey Dunn (co-sponsored by the Bioinformatics Research Center and Department of Genetics at North Carolina State University)
- Computation phyloinformatics: Rutger Vos, Bill Piel and Christian Zmasek (offered by the Computational Biology Research Center in Tokyo, Japan and co-sponsored by NESCent)
- Evolution and Medicine (offered by the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory and co-sponsored by NESCent)
